The Rape After (1986)

One of the the more interesting genres out there out there is what I (somewhat lazily) usually refer to as CAT III. This is not really a genre but instead a movie rating in Hong Kong, I E the more depraved stuff out there: "No one younger than 18 years of age are permitted to rent, purchase, or watch this film in a movie theatre". The rating is mainly there for erotic movies but has also spawned a breed of really nasty horrormovies like Men behind the sun, Ebola syndrome and Dr Lamb - movies that will shock most people. My personal favorites in the genre are the supernatural shockers, always full of exploitative nudity and violence and sometimes somewhat odd sensibilities towards human life that the rest of us arent used to. These are movies that can surprise you with its nastiness only to show you some really silly slapstick in the next scene. Eternal evil of Asia, Devil Fetus, Seeding of a ghost, the list is long of movies that everyone with an interest in this should watch. But now I might have a new favorite.

The Rape After (nice title, eh?) is the type of movie that make you go for your remote, pause and rewind and watch scenes over again just for the sheer WTF. I will have to include one particular spoiler of a scene to give you an idea of what kind of movie this is. We follow the somewhat sleazy fashion photographer Mo Hsien-Sheng who likes old stuff, burial artifacts and such. When doing some model shoots at an old temple he steals a statue of a demon and takes it home, along with the model in order to get her drunk and take advantage of her. They both get way too drunk for anything like that to happen and fall asleep. During the night the model is assaulted by a demon that comes from the statue. Yes boys and girls, never steal demonstatues. Nothing more comes out of this, Mo meets a nice young lady and decides to get married and all is well until the model returns, now pregnant and believing that he is the father. Awkward. Mo persuades her to get an abortion and brings her to a sleazy clinic, the type where the performing doctor is all sweaty and disgusting but before the abortion can be done an unknown force demolishes the clinic and manages to give the doctor a syringe in the eye. We all know it is the demon baby ghost but the other characters seem to think of this as something completely normal, just an accident. Forget about the screaming and the supernatural happenings. Life goes on, eh? All of this culminates when the model dies in a car accident where Mo was driving and now things get really fun and weird.

Ok, to give a good description of this type of movie I will now describe one scene in particular, just to get your interest and reel you in into the wonderful world of CAT III. The charred and very pregnant corpse of the model is brought into the morgue (an excellent piece of makeup sfx) and an autopsy is performed. When the belly is opened a pair of hands comes out of the stomach and grabs the head of the doctor, ripping it from his neck. The other doctors flee and we watch the really strange image of the demon baby crawling out of the sliced up belly into the night as the umbillical cord is ripped off. Wow.

The rest of the movie follows Mo and his wife as they move into a new house, haunted by the demon and as things go we go through the usual proceedings. People die in various groovy and gory ways until Mo goes to find a priest to exorcise the demon, nothing new here. It is, however, the individual set-pieces that stand out. My favorite scene is when a person in the house hears a baby crying at night and goes down to the main floor to find a group of small children playing in slow motion. Eerie and creepy at the same time and this goes for rest of the movie that moves along at a good pace and perhaps a bit more finesse with the camerawork and technicals than some of the more low brow CAT III flicks. Towards the end we even get a bit of zombie flesheating as an added bonus an in all, this is a very fine example of this genre. Unfortunately this is not available on dvd as far as I know (I watched a slightly blurry vhsrip that at least was in widescreen) which is a god damn shame since this as of now probably my favorite CAT III flick. Recommended to fans of gore and exploitations everywhere.